Time to get back to it...

I guess I decided to take some time off from blogging about my baking adventures. To be honest, I didn't realize it had been quite that long since my last post (March?! Really?!). It's been a busy spring/summer, but I'll try harder to post more often so you can drool at your computers :)

Since March, I've done lots of projects, but some of the bigger ones are the ones I'll post about. The first was a baby shower for a set of twin boys. The theme was "Two Peas in a Pod" and I got a request for a small cake and frosted sugar cookies.

For the cake, since it was a pretty simple white background and since the mother-to-be loves my frosting, plain ol' buttercream worked just fine. The decorations (leaves, pea pod, small flowers, and baby faces) were made using gum paste. It dries a bit harder and faster than fondant and is still edible so it works perfect for when you need a small amount. I have to say, this cake was a lot of fun to decorate. Pretty simple, but lots of little flowers and leaves and really small swirly things.

The cookies were going to have a pea pod and the same smiley faces on them. I follow a blog called My Kitchen Addiction (you can follow the blog here) and she does the most amazing decorating with royal icing (smooth looking frosting that looks seriously impossible). I thought I'd give that a shot for these and did a small test. Epic fail. I wish I would've kept photos for you to see...but I didn't. Just believe me...awful. In fact, since I got a new phone, I don't even have a good picture of the cookies. I do have this blurry one of the final cake/cookie table though...so that's good enough right?! I stuck with what I know I can work with (more buttercream icing) and they turned out pretty cute.

A very Dora birthday

This weekend's project was a very Dora inspired birthday cake and cupcakes for a very cute little girl named Ariya. I scoured Pinterest for some ideas and found a few different things I liked from different cakes and pictures, but not one that I liked altogether. I decided to take a few different ideas and try them out. I think they turned out pretty cute. 

The cake is vanilla and the frosting is a swiss meringue frosting (similar in taste to buttercream, a little less sweet, and MUCH easier to make look smooth - almost like a fondant finish). I was a bit disappointed that the meringue frosting doesn't color as well as regular buttercream. I used "electric" food coloring for the colors, but the purple on the cake still ended up looking more pastel than electric. You can see the difference in purple colors on the stars at the top and flowers on the sides of the cake. Same food coloring but totally different colors. Below is a picture of the cake before the Dora cake topper I bought (yeah, I'm not attempting to make Dora and that little monkey guy out of fondant quite yet...)

I made small batches of regular buttercream for the cupcakes and round dots at the base of the cake. Now those turned out to be the electric colors I had hoped for. The stars and flowers I made out of gum paste. Not quite as tasty as the homemade marshmallow fondant I make, but it's so much easier to work with plus it seems to dry so much faster, making it easier to cut out and use almost immediately when you're doing shapes like stars/flowers. I wouldn't use it on anything huge, but for shapes that no one is going to be eating I think it works great. Below is a picture of the cupcakes. I used an angled piping tip to create a flowery look underneath the flowers I cut out of gum paste. 

Here's the finished product after I delivered them to the party, including the Dora cake topper and candles. Some of the stars got a little crooked in the car on the way to the party...but I was just glad when I woke up on Sunday morning they were still attached to the wire holders* I had put them on the night before.

*I bought the curly wire holders at Michael's in the baking section. I think they're the Duff brand...also the same brand of food coloring I used for these. I cut them to different lengths and then attached a star to the top of each one.3

Let's get tropical

 Over the weekend I made a tropical cake for a friend's birthday party bash with a Hawaiian theme. We settled on pineapple cake (she doesn't like coconut, so I can't actually call it a pina colada cake, right?) with a rum buttercream frosting and mango filling. I was pretty convinced the mango filling tasted awful, but it turns out I just don't like mango. I was reassured at the party that the cake and filling was excellent, thankfully!

Below is a picture of my disaster of a kitchen, but with the cakes nicely settled on their travel cardboard. I definitely didn't want to travel across town with a 3-tiered cake in my car. Yikes.

Once I got to the party, I added some extra leis to the cake and a few umbrellas from the bar, and even a palm tree made it on there. Pretty cute right? It does help to put the cake in the fridge after the first layer of frosting, then you can really smooth out the second layer before the fondant goes on...but I didn't have the space in the fridge or the time to make that happen...but once you cut it no one notices anyway, right?!

I'm Still Here!

I swear I didn't fall off the face of the Earth since my last post. I was gone for a few weeks over the holidays and then apparently very busy in the new year, including two back-to-back trips out to California for work. I haven't done much baking, but I did get an awesome new book for Christmas called Baking: From my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan, and I think you should know about it.

This book is pretty fantastic. While I was home for Christmas, I made some key lime meringue pie, sugar cookies, Russian tea cakes, and a vanilla pudding with chocolate ganache from the book. The key lime pie is my favorite by far, and since I've never made a meringue before, I actually made the pie twice while I was home just to get it down (and because everyone wanted more).

If you like to bake, even just a little, I'd seriously recommend this book. I've made it my mission to try and make everything in it...including that lovely black and white cake on the cover. I've paged through the entire book and marked pages that I'd like to try first, but everything in it looks good. Nothing in the book seems too complicated or advanced, so even if you aren't a baking whiz you could still use it.

That's it for now kids. I do have some more baking jobs coming up including a Hawaiian themed birthday cake and a Dora birthday cake. I'll be sure to post lots of pictures when I complete them!

The Famous Sugar Cookies

I call these famous only because I get a lot of requests for these at Christmas and get told all the time that they're extra amazing. The secret? Almond extract. I wish I thought of it myself, but I didn't. It's in the recipe I use. The best part? You don't need to refrigerate the dough before you roll it out. I don't have enough foresight to actually make the dough the day before I plan to bake the cookies. I've made these cookies dozens of times and the recipe always turns out amazing.

I have these down to a science: each pan bakes for 4 minutes in the oven, then they're taken out and cooled on the cookie sheet for 2 minutes until I transfer it to a wire cooling rack until it's time for frosting. The cookies turn out soft without being gooey, but baked enough so they aren't super crunchy. No one likes a hard sugar cookie.

The downside of these cookies? The mess. See below for proof.

As mentioned in my last post, I use the Wilton gel food coloring. It makes much better vibrant colors than the liquid stuff, plus you can buy a specific shade of green and not have to try to mix colors together to get your desired color. Much easier! I made a double batch of frosting and divided it up into bowls and then added blue, yellow, green, and red to get my Christmas colors.

Here are some of the finished cookies. I'm a big fan of the Santa ones...I usually make some black frosting and make a mouth for Santa but I just wasn't feeling like making a whole bunch more colors. The bottoms of the trees had to be red instead of brown for the same reason, but I still think they're cute. And more importantly, they taste good!

Baking with Booey

I got a request for some Christmas themed cupcakes last night and since I didn't have much time (or supplies) at home, I thought the closest I could come was making some Santa hat cupcakes with red and white frosting. As I was baking and frosting them, I was trying to come up with a good blogging topic other than just the photos of what I've made (which I'm still including, because they turned out really cute). The one that came to mind was the one question I get asked all the time: why does your "fill in the blank here" taste so much better than mine, even when I used your recipe?

Answer? I don't know. I don't use any secret ingredients and I usually buy the generic store versions of everything from flour to sugar to butter. I do try to buy real vanilla extract, but honestly...I can't really tell the difference in anything other than frosting. I know baking is more of an exact science, but I'm not the type of person who sifts my flour and mixes the dry ingredients first in a separate bowl and wet in another only to combine them in a whole new bowl. Are you kidding me?! Do you know how many dishes I'd be doing?! I do mix everything (except for frosting and whipped cream) by hand rather than using the Kitchen Aid stand mixer that Santa left for me last year. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE it and couldn't live without it, but there's something about mixing a recipe by hand with a spatula that makes the end product so much more of an accomplishment. Plus, how else do you know if you've over mixed it??

I jokingly tell most people that my secret is that I make everything with love and that's why it tastes so much better. I have very fond memories of watching my grandma whip up carrot bars or rhubarb cake for the endless parade of friends or relatives that were coming to visit. She always used this tan colored ceramic bowl and had a heck of an arm whipping together whatever was in there. I think of her and that bowl almost every time I bake. I wonder if that bowl is still floating around somewhere...

Back to Santa hat cupcakes: here they are! In case you're wondering, I used plain red cupcake liners and then piped the white frosting using a large star tip in a circle for the base of the hat. I sprinkled on some white sugar sprinkles and then piped the red frosting* using a bigger star tip, followed by a little dot of white on the top (with some more sugar sprinkles). I really like the addition of the sprinkles, I was hoping it would make them a little more festive and I think it worked. I hope they're a hit at the Christmas party!

*On a side note, if you're making something that needs a lot of red frosting, make sure you buy the red food coloring that specifically says "no taste" on it. There is a difference, and it takes a LOT of food coloring to make a deep red color. I use the Wilton gel food coloring, you can find it at Michael's and some Walmart stores now.

Update...Finally!

So apparently I'm not so good at remember to blog while I'm in the middle of projects, or even after. I've done lots of baking lately...some gingerbread cupcakes with a maple cream cheese frosting, more pumpkin cupcakes with salted caramel buttercream frosting, and some more fun stuff like Irish car bomb cake (stout chocolate cake, whiskey chocolate ganache, and Bailey's frosting) and even some chocolate cupcakes with bikini wearing bears for a little girl's birthday. I also tried (for the first time) to make cheesecake. I attempted a turtle cheesecake for a coworker who just came back to work after maternity leave...and while it was very delicious...it was a bit of a soupy mess. I'll know for next time to bake it a bit longer!

While I don't quite have business cards yet, I did finally get a baking specific email address. So, if you'd like to order something, or have more questions you can reach me at booeybakes@gmail.com. Also, I pin a lot of ideas on Pinterest, so you can browse the stuff I find on either my cake decorating board or baking board.